Ten years ago this week, on March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

The war officially ended on Dec. 15, 2011 — eight years, eight months, three weeks and four days later — when the last American forces withdrew. In the days between, hundreds of thousands of lives were altered irrevocably. Home Fires asked 16 veterans who served in Iraq to reflect on how their lives changed on the two dates bracketing the war. Their accounts will be published in Home Fires on consecutive days this week.

Forces

By Phil Klay

A few days before the United States invades Iraq, one of my teammates collides with an Irish rugger so hard he somehow manages to knock himself out and has to be carried off the field, his body convulsing in the stretcher. The Dartmouth Rugby Team is on spring tour in Ireland, and our one relative strength is that when we land hits we cream the other players. We were raised on American football, after all, though this advantage doesn’t help us win. The Irish know the game, it’s their home turf, and they run circles around us. After the games, we outdrink the Irish and consider that our victory.

When Bush delivers his ultimatum to Saddam Hussein I watch it on television from my room in a Galway hotel. My roommate, a frighteningly strong and adorably stout Korean-American rugger, nicknamed “The Asian Square,” tells me his grandparents are prouder of his brother than they are of him. His brother goes to West Point — where General Douglas MacArthur went — and they still remember the Korean War.
Presumably the Asian Square’s brother will be heading to Iraq soon, and so will I. Once I graduate, I’ll be commissioned. Once I’m commissioned, my world of tests and papers and rugby matches will transform into something else — I’ll be part of a historical force, one that ended slavery, liberated France and stormed the beaches of Inchon. But for that force, South Korea could be suffering under Kim Jong-il. Iraqis are now suffering under Saddam. It’s not just about American lives, I think.

The day the war ends I meet my friend Perry, who was an Army medic. We go to an upscale bar instead of one of our usual dives and order drinks. No TV, no distractions. Neither of us knows how to mark the event.

“I’m just glad it’s over,” he says.

I nod and think, maybe it is. At least for Americans.

I’ve got an unquiet memory in my head. An Iraqi family after a suicide bombing. The father is spattered with blood. The left side of the mother’s face glistens from the salve the medics put on her shrapnel wounds, and the infant in her arms is swaddled in red-splotched gauze.

That was early 2007, during the surge. The mission then was to protect the local population.

As Perry and I try to tie a bow on eight years of war, I think of how wars end, and how they don’t, and for whom. I think about that Iraqi family again and how what I thought more than eight years ago was true. It’s not just about American lives.

PHIL KLAY served in the United States Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009, and was deployed to Iraq in 2007-8. He is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, “Redeployment,” and is a contributor to “Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War.” His work has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House and elsewhere.

Full Circle

By Mariette Kalinowski

It’s easy to remember where I was in March 2003, on the night of the invasion of Iraq: at a house party, getting drunk. I was 20 years old. Three months fresh out of Marine Corps boot camp, a semi-failed college student, and almost exactly two years from the end of my first combat tour, but I didn’t know it yet. I’m old enough to remember the first Gulf War. Not clearly, but in vague memories of troops staged along the Saudi border, the bombing campaign and reports out of Riyadh. The images on CNN were entrancing to a 9-year-old: nothing but desert and sky, armored vehicles rolling along flat terrain, the regular, pulse-like plume of smart bombs detonating through grates in the sides of buildings. That iconic image of the Schwarzkopf-Bush high-tech military: a single, infrared-guided bomb homing in on a solitary building, a gray square with no sign of civilians. Clean, efficient, humanitarian.

I saw it all again at the party, a plastic cup of beer in my hand, Outkast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad” blasting on repeat. I watched the muted news, and that same smart bomb image flashed on the screen. The same squid-ink tones of the explosion through nightvision, the same almost-beautiful blossom upward through the hovering crosshairs and into the eye of the viewer.

Watching that clip, I became the bomber looking down on the target. That image, looping a few times, brought me full circle. Two presidents, a single dictator, and a second generation stepping up to the same conflict, but repackaged for our benefit. Déjà vu washed through me, quick on the heels of my buzz, while the other college kids played beer pong and discussed spring break plans, who was doing who.

The end of the war came at a turbulent time in my life. I was finishing my last semester of undergraduate studies and had roommate troubles that distracted me from the end of combat operations. I remember feeling frustrated about the troop withdrawal and having a few bar room conversations about how it was too soon, how Iraq wasn’t ready to do things on its own. But that was just an angry vet talking — angry at seven years in the Marine Corps and two tours in Iraq for what seemed like nothing.

For the most part, though, I was like any other American: too absorbed in my own life to be bothered. Funny how people change.

MARIETTE KALINOWSKIserved in the United States Marine Corps from 2002-10, and was deployed twice to Al Taqaddum, Iraq. She currently studies fiction at Hunter College in New York, and is a contributor to “Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War.”

Generations

By Colby Buzzell

A decade ago, I found myself inside the chow hall at Fort Lewis, Wash., a fresh-cut private in the United States Army, trying to eat while explosions were going off all around me. Every soldier in the room was glued to a TV hosting a major network reporting the invasion of Iraq with the enthusiasm of covering a Super Bowl. The periodic cuts to commercial breaks struck me as darkly disturbing, but what frustrated me most and made the war finally unbearable to watch was the fact that I was scared to death that it’d all be over by the time I got there.

The broadcast images looked eerily familiar. While watching Desert Storm unfold on the TV in 1991, I had asked my father, a decorated Vietnam vet, if he thought the war would be over by the time I was old enough to enlist. I was in junior high. He appeared disturbed by my question but answered truthfully. He pointed out that Vietnam had lasted well over a decade, and that if you looked at history it seemed like every 10 years or so we found ourselves in another war.

While stationed at Fort Lewis I wanted nothing more than to be in Iraq. As an infantryman in Iraq, I spent most of my combat deployment wanting nothing more than for the war to end and for me to come back home. Back home, I’ve often wondered if perhaps bright red blood does indeed make the green grass grow.

Photo

In Iraq, 2004.Credit Courtesy of Colby Buzzell

The end of the war came and went in a blur. I probably drank heavily that night — I don’t remember. What I do recall is accidentally coming across a Reuters report on the Internet: The last convoy of U.S. soldiers pulled out of Iraq on Sunday, ending nearly nine years of war that cost almost 4,500 American and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives…

My honorable discharge hangs proudly above my desk. Around it are framed snapshots of my platoon mates and me in the desert. Nobody’s ever convinced me the war’s over. Nobody. As one famous American general put it, “We’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction.” That’s pretty much the way I see it.

What's Next

Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military. The project originated in 2007 with a series of personal accounts from five veterans of the Iraq war on their return to American life. It now includes dispatches from veterans of wars past and present.